The Telling of The Member of the Wedding: A Case for Strategic Formalism

In “Strategic Formalism,” Caroline Levine argues that the projects of literary and cultural studies should attend not only to literary forms but to a wide variety of forms as “ordering principles” (633) that both shape cultural objects and work within them to destabilize each other. Forms tend to “jostle one another, overlap, and collide,” (634) not only within the objects of analysis that we order under the heading “literature” but in every potential object of cultural study. Thus Levine does not present literature as the favored place where culture represents itself, but instead argues that though the literary is just one category of text among many, literary formalism can be especially useful in that “it offers a highly developed and refined vocabulary for the intricate interactions among different levels and kinds of order” (633).

            Conversely, in “Autumn of the System” Joshua Clover reverts to what I would argue is a more traditional position in literary studies, privileging literature as the place where literary and cultural forms work together to express and reflect upon their era. This is not to say that Clover positions literature somehow outside of the society it examines, but that its place in that society—as in Clover’s “ ‘poetics’ including poetry”—is to provide an “adequate cognitive mode for our present situation” (Clover 49).

            It seems to me that in searching for a poetics of “our historical moment” (34) Clover implicitly suggests there can be (to borrow a phrase) one cultural form to rule them all, while Levine takes a more liberal view of forms, advocating for the use of literary formalism strategically without losing sight of “the crucial importance of diversity, marginality, and excluded subject-positions” (634). But certainly both would agree that literary objects can suggest approaches to cultural discussions such as this one, and in light of this I want to read The Member of the Wedding as a cultural object that has something to tell us about how to study cultural objects.

            At first glance the novel could be seen to side with Clover in the power that it places, not only in the wedding but in “the telling of the wedding” (Member 51). If the wedding represents Frankie’s crisis of belonging and becoming, in the microcosm of the novel the wedding takes on the same kind of power as Clover’s financial collapse. Clover argues that the “fundamental problematic of the historical moment” in which he writes is a need to understand and express the “mystifying and elusive regime which rode American hegemony downward to darkness on extended credit” (Clover 34-35). Ultimately, for Clover, poetry and other non-narrative literature will help us do this.

In Member we can find a need to understand and express the wedding, which is potentially the “fundamental problematic” of the novel, through its telling. In the throes of the wedding’s anticipation, Frankie, who is in this section of the novel F. Jasmine, wanders the streets of her town making (possibly imagined) nonverbal “connections” with people and developing an intense desire to use words to “tell of the wedding and her plans” (48). In this way the novel, through Frankie, would seem to privilege the form of telling, which is comparable, if not equivalent, to the form of literature, as a way to consolidate crisis into expression. When Frankie wants to tell her father about the change that the wedding will create in her, “she sharpened her voice and chiseled the words into his head” (44).

            But the problem at first is that Frankie can find no one to tell, and then that when she finally does find an audience in a Portuguese café owner, she receives no consolation: “F. Jasmine, when she had finished, wanted to start all over again. The Portuguese took from behind his ear a cigarette which he tapped on the counter but did not light. In the unnatural neon glow his face looked startled, and when she had finished he did not speak” (50). Frankie’s earlier nonsense conversations with Berenice and John Henry in the kitchen have already proven the ineffectiveness of language. How, then, is the wedding, the “fundamental problematic,” to be expressed?

This is where we can see the very possibility of a “fundamental problematic” fall apart, and the novel draw closer to Levine’s insistence on the need for a strategic way to deal with diversity and instability. Frankie/F. Jasmine/Frances is a profoundly unstable character, always in the process of becoming and un-becoming and re-becoming (see this post), and membership in the wedding is actually just an imagined possibility that never comes to be. The wedding itself, the “telling of the wedding,” and indeed the subject called Frankie, F. Jasmine, and Frances by turns are forms among many that, in Levine’s words, “jostle one another, overlap, and collide” in the novel, so that when we track the plot by anticipating the wedding or consider subjectivity through Frankie we must always be aware of the strategy at work in these approaches. Though Frankie yearns for a way to consolidate experience through a form of “telling,” just as Clover wants to find a way to express an era through poetry, Member, like Levine, insists on an understanding of forms that never forgets multiplicity and incongruity.